Google Summer of Code new organizations - Part two

We have two great new Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, OpenKeychain and Linaro.  It’s hard to believe that we are almost halfway through the coding period for GSoC 2014. Midterm evaluations for both mentors and students are due today, Friday, June 27.

OpenKeychain allows you to manage cryptographic keys and encrypt messages as well as files for your contacts on Android. Our project is focused on providing an easy user interface based on Android design principles. It implements the OpenPGP standard, often referred to as GPG or PGP, and enables a secure end-to-end communication in times of mass surveillance.

As a new organization to Google Summer of Code, we secured two student slots. One of our students will work on a better abstraction between cryptography backend and user interface code, resulting in some unit tests, while also working on a better integration of the OpenPGP web-of-trust. The other student will work on a better integration of OpenKeychain into the Android OS, including better support for file encryption and decryption using Android 4.4 features, integration with Android's contact application, and work on potential improvements for the API.

By Dominik Schürmann, OpenKeychain Organization Administrator

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world's leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 200 engineers consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture in many areas. We have teams working on the GCC toolchain, the Linux kernel, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces, networking and more.

This is our first year participating in the Google Summer of Code, and we are welcoming three students to our team. Gaurav Minocha's project is Linux Flattened Device Tree Self-checking, mentored by Grant Likely. Ricardo de Freitas Gesuatto will be working on a project entitled "Lightweight IP Stack on top of OpenDataPlane", mentored by Maxim Uvarov. Finally, Varad Gautam will be Porting UEFI to a Low-Cost Embedded Platform (BeagleBoneBlack), mentored by Leif Lindholm. We're looking forward to seeing how our newest engineers succeed this summer!

By Steve McIntyre, Linaro Organization Administrator